Denver

Another great meeting, this time with some fun additions (it seems this meeting gets improve infrastructure every single month - great kaizen!).

Announcements - Only in Boulder

The meeting started with a few announcements. The most important one for me was that the meetings will be coming to Denver. February 17th is at DU - signup now.

For example, someone has real estate on the creek for $500. It's $25 less if you bring your dog into the office. Only in Boulder.

The Bard Center has an open business plan competition coming up. Bard website for details.

There were lots of job announcements and a few people looking for work. They also have a resume table in the lobby now.

Then it was on to the presentations.

SurveyGizmo iRATE

Designed specifically for South By South West. In general, you are going to a conference and this presents a list of sessions. You can say "I'm going to this session" and it will give you the schedule with links to the map of where the event is. It also lets you rate the sessions you are going to and provides the ability for admins to create polls during sessions.

Q: Revenue Model? SurveyGizmo making enough money on its own that they don't need a revenue model for this. Enabling this for SXSW is a way to test out the market.

Q: Available to surveygizmo subscribers? Available to anyone who wants to be a beta tester.

TapTapCards

iPhone and website application to send photos as postcards including photos taken with the iPhone. It's got all the basic features you'd imagine it should have.

Looking for feedback and testers.
* Sell the application and include 3 free postcards along the way.
* Postmark from a specific place.
* Print quality, especially for iPhone photos? Pretty decent.

This was my second New Tech meetup (review of July meetup) and it was much better than last time, which is saying a lot because last time was pretty good. Perhaps that was because this was the 2 year anniversary, perhaps it was because all the demos were from TechStars, perhaps it was because I got there earlier so I could partake in the beverages and announcemens (like the wifi username/password).

Once again I'm keeping track of presentation software, browser, operating system, and this time I'm also keeping track of any software used to build their website and what their YSlow! rating is for their homepage.

EventVue Providing "community" Features to Conferences

Used Keynote and Firefox on mac osx. Blog: WordPress. YSlow: "C" (73).

EventVue participated in TechStars2008 and presented about a year ago at the NewTech Meetup. 2 weeks after they presented at the NewTech Meetup, they closed $250,000 in venture capital (they were very proud of this and challenged this year's crop to do the same).

In the past year, they've supported 28 conferences with their software (~2 conference signups per month). They signed up 9 new conferences in the last month.

The point is to make your time spent at the conference more valuable by helping you connect with conference attendees you already know or should know. They did a demo on the Defrag 2008 site where you can click on "who from my network is going" and also "invite people who aren't going" based on your LinkedIn network.

Web Application Security is a growing interest for me. Some activities I attended last week seem to show that it's a growing interest in general. Last Wednesday night the OWASP Denver chapter hosted a meeting about about 50 people at Raytheon Polar Services in Southeast Denver. After the free pizza and administrivia, the meat of the presentation was from the two major developers of Grendel Scan.

The Open Web Application Security Project - Denver

As chapter organizer David Campbell said, OWASP could also stand for Owning Web Applications while Sipping Pints. All I can say is that if you're a developer you should go to at least one OWASP meeting. You'll learn enough that you'll be scared - which is the right place to start. Then you can harness that fear and learn enough to be empowered to protect your code. If you're a manager, you need to give your employees time off so they'll go to this.

Then, you shold look for tools that can help your developers and QA folks in their work.

Vulnerability Assessments With Grendel Scan

Grendel Scan is a vulnerability assessment tool written by David Byrne and Eric Duprey, employees of TrustWave and Echostar respectively. It is a surprisingly powerful tool given that they've only been working on it for about a year. The 1.0 version will be released at the upcoming DefCon and I think it will instantly become pretty popular. In my initial testing it found weaknesses while providing relatively few false positives. Unfortunately, the version currently

But, as the authors of Grendel stressed several times, scanning tools are just a start. What you really need is a complete end-to-end consciousness of security issues.

HP / SpiDynamics - Live Hacking Workshop

We're just under 3 weeks away from DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 which will be held July 26th and 27th. We're accepting more presentations and already have several great sessions to vote on.

I want to highlight a few notable things about this DrupalCamp.

Remote Presenters Welcome

Thanks to the work of Kevin Reynen we are welcoming remote presenters to the camp. If you can't make it to Colorado but want to share your message, this is your opportunity.

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